Where are you getting ice from in 1500s Italy? You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection? People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day. You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados. Get bit by the wrong mosquito? You're possibly dead from malaria, and no doctor can treat you. (People still die today, but you're much, much more likely to survive) Get syphilis? Your body is going to slowly rot away. Having a kid? Better have a few backups, because even the children of the rich dropped like flies.
Labor was cheap in the ancient world. But the reality is that machines and technology do a lot of work better than a human hand. No matter how many people you hire, nobody is cooling and preserving your food as well as a typical $500 refrigerator. And nobody is cooling your house as well as a $500 AC either. Air conditioning revolutionized the world because it made lots of places that were borderline inhabitable habitable. It doesn't matter how rich you were, life in Saudi Arabia wasn't as comfortable as it is today. Vaccination, antibiotics, windows, and AC made tropical areas much more habitable for everyone.
The Romans had ice available even for common people. They harvested it from the mountains. Ice can be stored a surprisingly long time if kept out of sunlight and packed correctly. I know less about 1500s Italy specifically, but obviously the technology existed if people wanted to do it.
> You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection?
An infection was bad news, but by no means guaranteed. Soldiers frequently suffered horrific wounds and survived, assuming they weren't on an interminable hell campaign with no chance to recover. It's actually quite surprising how resilient people are.
> People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day.
Where are you getting the 15km number? Of course it depends on the topography, but also the mode of transportation.
> You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados.
It really depends on what you are eating. Trade did bring all sorts of exotic food items hundreds or thousands of miles.
What other mode of transport did you have? ships was all. even if you used an oxcart (not a horse - they eat too much for this work) it was slow.
okay 15km is too short. Average walking speed is 5km/hr and you would expect to walk 10 hours a day. So movement would have been more like 50km per day.
You ignored my point that however you slice and dice it the royalty could afford ample leisure time that modern day people cannot, even the upper classes spend more time working than almost anyone from nobility.
There are massive numbers of people who simply don't work at all today. There are plenty of people with inherited wealth doing nothing, just like royalty before.
A child of a movie star today is living a much more exciting and relaxmaxxed life than a typical prince 500 years ago. And they don't have to march out to battlefields sometimes, get massacred by their cousins or constituents, or die of being inbred. Guarantee you that you could take any prince from centuries ago, show them first class on an airplane and beach resorts in French Polynesia and they'd 100% prefer "settling" for that over slow carriage rides between cities.
> We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life.
But now you have shifted the goalposts to say the modern day royalty lives better than hundreds of years ago royalty. That is obvious, and not what anyone was claiming otherwise.
Labor was cheap in the ancient world. But the reality is that machines and technology do a lot of work better than a human hand. No matter how many people you hire, nobody is cooling and preserving your food as well as a typical $500 refrigerator. And nobody is cooling your house as well as a $500 AC either. Air conditioning revolutionized the world because it made lots of places that were borderline inhabitable habitable. It doesn't matter how rich you were, life in Saudi Arabia wasn't as comfortable as it is today. Vaccination, antibiotics, windows, and AC made tropical areas much more habitable for everyone.